Improve how you operate by making the implicit explicit
Everything Everywhere All At Once: Title of an excellent, award-winning movie. Also, an apt descriptor of how it feels to operate an early-stage startup. How can we fix this?
Table of Contents
You’re in the early days of building something new. It’s you and an idea. You scrawl brilliant musings on the back of a notepad, in the digital corners of your phone, and in ALL of the docs.
As you progress from idea to startup, you start doing more and writing less, and, if it’s going well, you add in hands other than your own. You can tell something is working, but everything is everywhere all at once, and you don’t have a sense of how things are actually happening. This means that you’ve established the way you do things, your operations, and a method of doing it repeatedly. This is when you need to write down your process, which likely isn’t fully clear, repeatable, doable, accessible to others, or - most importantly - scalable.
Not everything you do needs to be a codified process, and in fact, standardized operating procedures (SOPS) can work against independent thinking or problem-solving. But as you grow, a great process, when systematically and thoughtfully designed, reduces variance to produce scale.
How DO we go from operating in our heads to a structure that can lead us on a path to operational excellence?
Make the implicit explicit.
Why this works
The initial company operating system is quite simply based on hundreds of subconscious founder habits. When you’re a solopreneur or a small team of 2 - 3 with an idea, your existing working preferences end up establishing the way you operate. Most often, these habits become the ways not only you, but your entire organization, works. And, without much trying or intentional design thinking, this becomes your working culture.
As you add team members, early power dynamics conform work habits to founder preferences. What does this mean? How a founder subconsciously does her work sets the standard of work that’s set across the entire organization. Making the implicit explicit through thoroughly documenting how work gets done is the simplest exercise that nets the maximum output. Writing brings clarity of thinking, strategy, searching, leading, and managing. It’s the first step toward being an expert operator.
Why do this now
Soon, every business will have a chatbot to search archives and relay information the moment that it’s needed. It’s the end of organizing, and the fear of building a wiki that is unusable will disappear. However, without having explicit SOPs and written operations, you’ll be behind those who can operate efficiently while leveraging the speed of an easily accessible knowledge base as a competitive advantage.
Let’s break this down like an expert generalist. We’ll outline the tools you can use to get the work done, the rules or processes you can implement to move from idea to action, and a reflection on how different people can do this work.
There is no one-size-fits-all. Modern operations are the art and science of considering your tools, processes, and people that make up a system for how things get done.
how We Do: how to make the implicit explicit in two sequential, essential steps.
1️⃣ Identify what you’re currently doing. The best documents read like a kid’s birthday party invitation:
What you’re doing
Who is doing what
When it’s happening
How the action is occurring
Where it’s occurring (tools, systems, etc.)
Why it’s important to your customer or to an internal team member
Inspiration to keep in mind: “What we are familiar with, we cease to see” - Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life
Tools 🛠️
Choose the tool that is easiest for you to actually do the work. If you’re still learning the tool, the somewhat tedious work of documentation is even more laborious - you’re both working on learning the tool and documenting how to use it.
Google Sheets will allow you to put each step in a row while adding columns for the what, who, why, etc. for easy sorting and analysis.
Google Docs will allow for easy collaboration and commenting if you’re documenting your work with others.
Loom will allow you to visually walk through a process and explain in your own words how you get from point A to B, especially if the process takes you across multiple tools and screens to complete.
Guidde will give you visuals, while also documenting the process in written form.
Scribe is similar to Guidde but spits out long-form process docs, instead of a how-to video.
Notion will give you the ability to document using multiple formats in one easy-to-read page. You can build your process using text blocks, images, and databases, culling connecting processes together through synced blocks.
Rules (Process): 📝
Take time to spell out a process following those birthday party invite rules! Identify –
the action that is taken to achieve the output
the person(s) taking the action
time of day/week / month/year
the connection between what and who (how)
physical locations, tools & systems, or portion of a screen/portal
why it’s important to your customer or to an internal team member that this action is being done
Any risks/points of failure that might pop up throughout the process
Link and cross-reference where applicable. Make this a big ‘ol dump of everything you can tactically think of that relates to how you operate.
Add examples and edge cases where possible. Make it real by using real-life examples and where the process might have to go off-book.
Be explicit, but don’t overcomplicate it. Write it for someone else to read.
Read, and reread. What did you miss? (There’s always something!)
Bonus step! Have someone test what you’ve written. Is it clear?
People: 🫶
If you’re documenting a process that includes multiple people, ensure you get contributions from others (after giving the document a first pass). The process will be skewed if it's only viewed from your eyes. Think about this as an exercise in co-creation.
If this is a process that only you do, start with detailing the roadblocks that are in the way of your goals.
2️⃣ Add explicit detail to implicit experiences
Review each step that you outlined in part 1, and document the feelings, behaviors, and motivations behind these actions. How do your people show up when this is completed? What is the ultimate outcome of the task? Include both feelings and facts to make the implicit explicit (more on this below).
Inspiration to keep in mind: “Familiarity and convenience offer us control, which in turn offer us predictability if we can predict our environment, we can increase our chances of survival” - The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control
Tools 🛠️
For Google Sheets, add a column to begin this analysis in a bold color, something that reminds you that this is most important. The same rules apply to Google Docs.
For video documentation tools, use comments and emoji reactions to highlight key areas to return to.
Rules (Process): 📝
The most common problem with writing out a process in the early days of organizing your operations is that these processes don’t usually include context into the cultural forces that drive their adoption and effectiveness.
The best process is no process at all; culture creates processes without rules. Considering how individual motivations, beliefs, and behaviors impact the implementation and ultimate success of your internal operations, it’s crucial to really understand your operations. Start to define the cultural context under which these steps occur, and it’ll become clear how the process came to be its current state, and quick wins to improve where you’re at.
For every step in the process, document how a step is actually executed by your team. You’ll notice that you’re often documenting the implicit behaviors that exist in your company culture.
For every step in the process, write why this is happening the way it’s happening.
e.g. Here’s an example of an OKR planning process with added context.
People: 🫶
Question — if someone asks you about the weather, and you respond “It’s hot outside today,” is that a fact or a feeling? It’s a feeling. Your perception of what is happening is not the fact of what’s happening, at least not always. Understand how each step in a process is experienced by fact, and by feeling.
People Facts: What is the output of the step or task if you’re completing it as opposed to someone else on the team? Inputs produce outputs. Is the right person doing this work?
People Feelings: Consider your perspective on a specific step and task. How does it feel to show up? How do others show up?
Consider what’s happening implicitly in your culture based on personal work habits. For example:
“We use Asana to track this process, but only the operations team actually updates it.”
“We use Google Meet for the sales meetings; we wouldn’t send a Zoom for an internal meeting”.
Who is defending a broken process? Why?
Consider System Justification Theory: “Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.” Understand individual incentives towards supporting the status quo, and take time to address these and find solutions with your team.
Take It Up A Level
Now that it’s out there, prune prune prune. You’ll see straight away what’s great, and what isn’t so.
Using AI to Improve how You Do: Run a start-to-end process through ChatGPT. Ask it to —
“Improve this process for efficiency, removing unnecessary steps”
“Improve this process by removing all steps that do not include a benefit to either a customer or an internal team member”.
Remember - the outputs are only as good as the inputs. Be an expert prompt engineer by making sure you’re asking for exactly what you want, filtering for what’s important.
Separating Feelings From Facts: Throw the entire bulleted list into a spreadsheet and dig into the data
Exercise 1: Add a column with data-validation dropdowns “Conscious” and “Subconscious”. What’s happening because you’re choosing to do it, and what’s happening purely based on habit? Separate conscious vs. subconscious operations.
Exercise 2: The things you label Subconscious, add in a new tab. These are your Create 4 additional columns titled Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. Identify each step of the process to better understand where you can improve negative habits by slightly altering these triggers.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
We’ve taken the ideas above and put them into an action plan for you and your team.
🗒️ Meeting 1 - 60 minutes - how We Do | Identify how we’re currently operating
Agenda:
Reread this how We Do and remind yourself of the context. Set up and choose your tools. (10 minutes)
Process dictation (time-box your work!) (30 minutes)
Review what’s written (5 minutes)
Add in additional detail. Consider other team members perspectives. Have you considered the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the existing process? Is it clear to someone who doesn’t have the context to pick up the work? (10 minutes).
Give the text a final read, and clean up your work. Make sure Meeting #2 is scheduled and share with relevant stakeholders (5 minutes)
🗒️ Meeting 2 - 45 minutes - how We Do | Add explicit detail to implicit experiences
Agenda:
Share context with other meeting attendees, and ensure they’ve read the text and are prepared with questions. (10 minutes)
Ask each person to add cultural context to each line, asking each other clarifying questions along the way if needed. (10 minutes)
Share your results, and get ready to be real. There’s a vulnerability to digging into your operations in this way that blends fact with feeling. Make space to have these conversations with candid feedback on what’s actually happening, and how to make paths forward (20 minutes).
Save time for reflection and make sure meeting 3 is scheduled within a few days while this work is top-of-mind, but not immediately following so the team has time to process their experiences. (10 minutes)
🗒️ Meeting 3 - 45 minutes - how We Do | Analyze and MAKE CHANGES!
Agenda:
Share context with other meeting attendees, and ensure they’ve read the text and are prepared with questions. (10 minutes)
Review key processes, highlighting the formerly implicit cultural implications of steps. Discuss the whys, and allow space for all voices in the room who may touch the process, not just the loudest. (10 minutes)
Complete a Start Stop Continue exercise to quickly prune the great from the “this-just-isn’t-working-for-us”s. (20 minutes)
Give the text a final read, and clean up your work. Schedule a 15-minute re-review in a quarter, a crucial step to make sure your team is all “singing the same song”. (5 minutes)
Operations are so much more than what you do. How we do what we do so often is subconscious, implicit, and under-analyzed. By explicitly outlining both the work we do and how the work is really being done, we can better design operating systems that connect our people to our key processes. Ultimately, we can take our state from “everything everywhere all at once” to a state of work that scales our efforts and exceeds our expectations.
Writer: Britt
Collaborators: Scott, Renata, Caleigh, Nick, Emily
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